Team Herald
CALANGUTE: The trial run of the mechanical beach cleaning by the tourism department contractor failed at Calangute beach on Tuesday. The screening machine meant to clear the garbage and other waste could not remove even half of the dumped garbage even after three rounds of trial cleaning. Calangute MLA expressed his unhappiness over the mechanical cleaning and hoped that better machinery would be put in place before the start of the tourist season.
Rather than removing the plastic and other wastes littered on Calangute beach, the machinery covered them with sand. The officials of Department of Tourism were also not too happy with beach cleaning exercise held in presence of Minister for Tourism Dilip Parulekar.
Michael Lobo told media persons, covering the event that “Though it was said to be a trial run, I am not too happy with the screening machine which was used to clean the beach today. I had seen similar machines doing a splendid job in Sri Lanka and Dubai, but the present one cannot clean our beach and won’t be suitable for our costal belt of Calangute.’
The beach cleaning contractor needs to improvise on his machinery before the tourist season starts, he said.
Tourism Minister Parulekar admitted that trial run of the mechanical beach cleaning was not successful.
